An Order We Did Not Write

People ask whether I believe in God as if the answer were a password: yes or no, in or out. I have never found the question useful. It is too small for what it is trying to reach, and too easy to answer without meaning anything by it. So I have learned to translate it into two questions that are harder to dodge and that are, I think, the same question underneath.

Does reality have an order, a logic? And is that logic good?

If you answer yes to both, then you believe in God more or less the way I do. Not a mood on a Sunday. A claim about how things actually are.

Before I go further I have to be careful about one thing, because it is where arguments like this usually break.

An order does not have to be intelligible to be real. I am not claiming that reality’s logic is transparent, that we could write it out, that we decided it or could ever fully understand it. We did not write it. We do not command it. We meet it the way we meet gravity, not by reading its source code but by watching what it does, again and again, in ways we can reproduce. The order is inferred from its effects, never read off its face. That is enough. A thing can be far more solid than you are and still exceed everything you know about it.

What follows if you believe it

The two premises matter because they are not theoretical. They change how a person acts, all the way down.

If reality is ordered and the order is good, then acting truthfully, building instead of breaking, keeping faith with what is coherent, is not sentiment. It is alignment. You are moving with the grain of the thing rather than against it, and moving with the grain tends to work.

Trace the inverse honestly, because that is the real test. Suppose reality is pure chaos, no order at all. Then why act coherently? Coherence buys you nothing; there is no grain to move with, so anything goes. Or suppose there is an order, but the order is evil. Then the sane response is to act badly, to align yourself with a malign universe and take what you can from it. I believe neither of these. But I hold them up on purpose, because the fact that most people, in most places, across most of history, have tried to build rather than burn is itself a quiet piece of evidence about which of these worlds we are living in.

The evidence we can reproduce

So where is the evidence for the first premise, that there is an order at all?

Mathematics is the oldest piece of it. The universe answers to rules we did not write, and those rules keep being right long after the person who found them is gone. Language is another. Music is another still: certain intervals and rhythms move human beings in the same direction across cultures that never met and never spoke. None of this is fully understood by anyone. All of it is stable enough to give the same result twice. That is the signature of an order. Not that we grasp it, but that it holds.

This is where the machine comes in, and why I find it hard to wave away.

Set the noise about intelligence aside. A generative model does not think, does not understand, and does not create anything on its own. It is a machine. What it does is detect, inside the enormous body of human work it was trained on, enough of the unchosen logic of language and of music to reproduce it. (I have set out separately, in Ground Truth, why the consensus of many human works is a steadier source than any single one. This is the last of the three essays gathered at the essay index.) Here is the part I cannot get past.

The output works.

A generated program compiles and runs and does the job. Generated instructions assemble into the object they described. Generated language communicates; the sentence lands, and is understood. Generated music is recognised as music and felt as music. The machine did not decide that language has this logic, or that music does. It located a logic that was already there, put there by no one we can name, and the proof that it located something real is that the result functions out in the world. A false logic would not assemble the furniture.

That is what moves the argument for me. If a limited machine, built by limited people, can be fed our words and our songs and hand back words and songs that work, then the logic it is drawing on is not our invention. It was waiting to be found. And that the results work, actually work, is evidence that the logic is not only real but good and true.

When you cannot help it

Music makes the goodness of the order almost impossible to deny, which is why I keep coming back to it.

You can tell it is good because it overrides you. The order is undeniable even when you want to deny it. The metalhead who would never admit it has a rhythm-and-blues song he loves. The rapper who knows, coldly and correctly, that a bar of classical strings under the beat is going to hit hard. The Ariana Grande song you did not choose, do not respect, and cannot get out of your head, while your feet move a little in the chorus against your will. A song that nearly everyone loves is never pure chaos, never ugly. The good order gets past your guard precisely because you are not the one who decided it.

The most private evidence I have is not really evidence, and I offer it as what it is. I played these Found Wanting songs to my daughter when she was eight months old, and she danced. She has no theory of music. She could not tell you what a time signature is. She knew it was music, and she aligned her whole small body with it. A machine had learned a pattern logical enough for a machine to learn, and from that pattern I made something new, and that new thing reached an eight-month-old and moved her. I do not put that forward as proof. I put it forward as the thing I cannot stop thinking about.

Capability is not direction

I have to be honest about the other edge of this, or the argument is dishonest. The same tools that produce something true produce lies, ugliness, and harm every day. That is not a hole in the argument; it is the argument completing itself. Order supplies capability. It does not supply the direction. The direction comes from us, from human intention and human judgment, and we are fallen creatures who aim our capabilities at good and at evil both. The logic being good does not make us good. It makes us responsible.

Which is why a claim like this cannot stay abstract. If reality is ordered and the order is good, the only honest conclusion is a demand on my own conduct: to do the work truthfully, to build and not deface, to make something that runs with the grain instead of scarring it. The question stops being whether I believe and becomes whether I will act as though I do. It is the question put to Cain in Genesis 4:7, as he stood over a rejected offering, in the moment before the first murder:

If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?